We have the Parsis to thank for this one. They set sail to India from ancient Persia 1300 years ago and are credited for some of the dishes we would now define as typically Indian. Dhansak and this Prawn Pathia are good examples, both blending heat with sour and sweet flavours. We have often served …
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Anyone who has stayed with us will know that we have an excessive number of cookbooks. One might think therefore that when Easter arrives all I have to do is peruse a couple of my favourite baking books, pluck a Hot Cross Bun recipe at random and off we go. No such luck. I spent …
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I love making bread with yeast in, really I do.. but sometimes I feel I’m spending the entire day making sure it has risen to just the right point and I get little else done! Kulcha naan is one of our favourite breads partly because of its simplicity but also because it is so light …
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We first came across this delicious nutty spice mix in Australia where we used to eat it with fresh Turkish bread and lashings of local olive oil. For some reason or other I completely forgot about it when we moved to France until this week. Our chickens are giving us a very healthy supply of …
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The search for the best Pasteis de Nata in Portugal…. My first experience of the egg tart was in the UK as a kid, in those old fashioned bakeries that all towns had before the supermarkets came along. It wasn’t my choice of cake (is it for any kid?!) but I remember my mum eating …
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The Jerusalem Artichoke is in my top 5 of vegetables…which is a pretty hard list for me to pick as I can’t think of a vegetable that I dislike (maybe okra….) At the mention of artichoke, you maybe thinking of a globe artichoke – the large green orb of firm petals that looks mysterious to …
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Here are my favourite cookbooks…we often get asked what are our favourite or most used cookbooks. My list rarely changes even though we buy quite a number of books every year. 4 out of 6 of my choices are from Australian chef’s which may seem bizarre but I find the Australian food scene to be …
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After the mammoth task of creating our kitchen garden, the first thing we planted was rhubarb and the same plant has treated us for 5 seasons with no signs of decline. Rhubarb is so easy to grow, I don’t do anything at all to it and it produces beautiful fat, red stems. The only small …
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Our bookshelf at Chalet Cannelle is mostly cookbooks and buying new additions is quite a regular event. Living in the mountains, we don’t have an amazing bookstore on our doorstep so a few times a year when we go off to a city for a few days, be it Turin, Lyon or London, we will …
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